


mono no aware

by chuchisushi



Series: linger [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Historical, Case Fic, Developing Relationship, Human!zenyatta, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Unreliable Narrator, casual discussion of a murder, don't worry they hook up at the end, implied/referenced animal cruelty, philosophical navel-gazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-05 01:09:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20480483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuchisushi/pseuds/chuchisushi
Summary: All that comes must go; the only constants are the road, the Iris, and the fight against the eternal remnants of what came before.Genji learns that he refuses to let Zenyatta walk this path alone.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> honestly i'm still not entirely sure i like this fic, but i wanted to get back into the saddle, so i decided to finish cleaning this up to post it. un-beta'ed, but still palatable (hopefully); takes place after _yomi_ but before zenyatta and genji meet up with hanzo and mccree in _migration_

Genji relearns both the world and himself as they wander.

Tekhartha’s name is Zenyatta, Genji learns. Long ago, he had shed the name of the family of his birth for that of his creed: he is a disciple of the Iris, one of its few fully fledged masters, and because all were one inside the Iris, so did the Shambali share a common name.

Zenyatta is powerful. He knows both himself and the forces of the universe that he wields, that he surrenders himself to; he is not of the spirit world as Genji himself is, now, but he is more _ aware _ of it in some ways, vision surpassing even Genji’s eye for tactics. 

Zenyatta calls himself a curator of the heart, something of a protector, and, as they travel, Genji begins to see why he speaks of what he does in such a way. Zenyatta does not do battle for the sake of it. He only fights to protect – fights to preserve. He stills tempers and eases despair where he may, whether the souls are human or spirit in origin; he acts as mediator where needed; he destroys as an absolute last resort.

Genji is not so versatile. He only knows the latter. He gains a nodachi as a token of gratitude from a spirit who acted as a swordsmith. He gains a wakizashi as an inherited will: the last regret of a samurai slain by his own hand after his faithful execution of a dishonorable order. At the beginning, it had lamented quietly at his waist. Now, it speaks as only a gentle murmur, its regret quietened little by little by each innocent soul saved.

Genji finds his own heart stilling alongside it, though he has only atoned for a fraction of the hundredfold lives he had taken in his hunger. He is not – cannot be – rid of his nature; he is not Shimada Genji, is not a _ man _ anymore. He is a dragon of the northern storm, cold air and a typhoon’s strength: rain follows them more often than not, clouds dogging their heels. 

(He makes Zenyatta wear thicker robes, recalls the skills that his family had taught him to weave together a grass cloak for the monk to shed as much rain as he can.)

(He knows – he _ knows _ Zenyatta is strong, but Zenyatta is amazingly, terrifyingly weak in so many other ways; buoyed now by the golden pulse of the Iris seeded by Zenyatta’s strength, he can _ feel _ the way the man’s human heart stutters.)

(The Iris is kind, Genji learns. But it is powerful and it is implacable and it shows no mercy or restraint when Zenyatta surrenders his self to it.)

(It tears him down, little by little.)

* * *

“Do you – fear death?” he asks of Zenyatta one evening. They huddle by the fire side-by-side, aligned from shoulder to flank to hip to thigh; it is barely into autumn, but Genji stokes the fire warm for the soft shivers that yet rack the monk’s frame. There had been a clan of fox spirits, led by an ancient matriarch with nine tails and teeth as long as Genji’s forearm, who had taken exception to the encroachment of the nearest village’s farmland upon their ancestral territory. 

Zenyatta had spoken with them, then with the village head, and then with the clan again, and so it had gone until each had grudgingly agreed to meet the other to negotiate the terms of a treaty – and Zenyatta had bathed both sides in golden light to bridge the gap, to allow them to see eye to eye as they spoke.

Neither party had left the negotiating table satisfied, yet despite how that was the way of treaties, despite the monk’s work, Zenyatta and Genji had not been offered shelter, a deliberate slight that stung Genji like a hornet. It was dishonorable, _ unkind_; and yet Zenyatta had merely laid a restraining hand upon Genji’s knee and blessed the future of the two families. 

(He had needed Genji’s help to rise)

The dragon that had once been a man had had to bite back the bone-deep urge to rain the village’s precious crops to _ rot _ for their disrespect.

But he hadn’t. He hadn’t. 

Instead Genji had found them a sheltered clearing in the woods, gathered tinder and branches and logs to coax a flame to life. Had shaken out the thick blanket that was now wrapped about Zenyatta’s shivering frame, covering even his tonsured head. Genji had cooked rice gruel supplemented by what he could forage from the woods, and Zenyatta had eaten it in tired silence, allowing Genji’s care.

And now Genji asks, “Do you fear death?” of the man, and Zenyatta replies, “Yes.”

He smiles, and it is an old, tired thing. “Yes. Of course I fear death, as any animal, as any living being does. I would not struggle so strongly to survive if I did not.” He leans more heavily into Genji’s side. “But I have made my peace with dying. I know that it will come for me, and then sooner rather than later. 

“Instead of lingering upon the inevitable and what I cannot predict, I turn my gaze to the rest of the world and what resides within it. I can only hope that, when I finally become one with the Iris, I will leave this place behind in a kinder state than it had been when first I came.”

Genji breathes out, though he has no need for air, and it escapes him like a growl, like a sob. “You are too kind for this world, Zenyatta,” he says, half-plaintive, and Zenyatta shifts enough to lay a hand upon his wrist in answer, quiet comfort.

“Do not fear,” he murmurs, soft. “I am with you yet.”

Later, when Zenyatta falls into exhausted slumber, Genji stands watch, alert against any threat.

* * *

They travel, and it takes too-many weeks for Genji to realize the quantity of ground they have covered, the too-many miles of road left behind. He is, briefly, ashamed. Genji learns there are things he knows about his existence now and things he Knows about his existence now. He can always find water. He always orients himself southwards if idle, unconsciously. He does not dream anymore – instead, he closes his eyes and his spirit, freed, soars into the sky to entwine with the clouds; his scales and claws, fangs and self dissolve into vapor and rain and thunder and lightning. His voice becomes the keen of the wind.

It is the little things that escape him, that he has to be taught. It thus takes the length of too-many weeks for him to realize that they have traveled far further than one could reasonably expect for two supposed men on foot. Zenyatta beams at him when he brings it up one night beside their campfire, tucks his hands inside his sleeves.

“The Iris provides,” Zenyatta says, and his smile is a mischievous, golden thing. Genji clicks his tongue and gets to his feet, shakes himself out like shedding favored clothes and stretches all green-blue muscle under scales, after. 

Then he turns and insistently worms his head between where Zenyatta sits and the log he is leaned against until Zenyatta relents, laughing, and shifts to give him the room to fit. Genji huffs, pleased with it, and squeezes his body through the gap until he lies in stormwater coils about Zenyatta and the campfire, until he tucks his snout under the bends of Zenyatta’s knees. Zenyatta reaches out and down and scratches the tip of Genji’s nose, at where scales become hair along his jaw and chin, and Genji rumbles with it, pleased, like distant thunder, calm and willingly tamed to Zenyatta’s touch.

* * *

He was not the only mononoke Zenyatta slew, Genji learns.

There are others, of course. The Iris guides the monk’s steps to the true demons, to the uneasy spirits, to those born of a grudge and power and desperation entwined with denial. Like Genji – like Genji once was.

And here, the Genji that he has become can do his best work. He is destruction, the northern storm, cruel winds and cold water and lightning striking the ground, but he is destruction tamed (willingly so) to the hand of a kind man that does not destroy when he can save. 

This is how Genji atones for what he did in his own rage, in his own dreams lost in hunger and the night of when his human form had been slain: he asks the universe for absolution with every swing of his blades, with each fang that sinks deep into cursed flesh. 

The blood of demons is bitter or sweet or rotten on his tongue, and Genji _ eats_.

* * *

Some fights are easy, Genji learns. Others are hard.

“The Iris provides,” Zenyatta breathes, and Genji is by his side in an instant, knees thudding against tatami as he bends to be close. Zenyatta gives him a watery smile, slowly withdraws a hand from underneath the covers, and lays it upon Genji’s head. Genji closes his eyes and _ loathes _ the tremble he can feel in the other’s fingers. 

“Three days and two nights,” Genji chokes out, nearly strangled by his rage. “Three days and two nights you have lain in this bed, insensate – Zenyatta, you cannot _ do _ this anymore. You cannot take such risks – ”

“The Iris sent me you as strength to conquer odds that I would not have been able to face on my own.” His cheeks are thin. The fine bones in his hands stand stark against his skin. “Is this not the least that I may do? To give back to the world that has harbored me?”

“You will _ die_,” Genji snarls, and, outside, thunder rumbles. There is the pause of barely a second and then the sound of rain.

“Genji,” Zenyatta murmurs. His hand slowly slips from the other’s crown, the man too weak to hold it where it lies. His smile has disappeared, and Genji _ aches_. “I am only human. I, too, will die one day.”

_ Not like this, _ Genji thinks. _ Not so soon, _ he wants to say. 

But Zenyatta’s eyes are already fluttering closed.

“Please rest,” is what Genji gives voice to instead, and, after Zenyatta’s breaths have evened into a steady rhythm of rise and fall underneath the blankets, Genji bows forward to touch his forehead against the futon next to where the other lies, both his hands clenched into fists in the cloth. Outside, lightning strikes too-close, but Zenyatta does not flinch nor stir at the roar of noise.

* * *

There are things that yet endure of his former life, Genji learns. 

It takes days more for Zenyatta to regain his strength, days that Genji spends at his side when he is not playing the gracious young lord to their hosts. If the situation were less dire, he would laugh for how this, of all things, remained: how the hours of politeness and diplomatic, social doubletalk yet were of use. His tutors would have been proud. 

Genji even gets an offer to be attached permanently to the house of their hosts, an offer that Genji has to struggle to not laugh at. He refuses courteously. Says that he has made his vows already and pledged his honor upon the monk at his side. Their hosts, who had recently been freed from the grasp of a curse placed generations ago by a longstanding grudge, subside.

When Zenyatta leaves, he does so quietly, without much fanfare, smiling reassuringly in the face of the concern from their maid, who had grown fond of the man during their stay. “I will take care of him,” Genji murmurs to her before they go, and the grateful look she gives him strikes him to the quick. He is trusted, despite his nature as a dragon of the northern storm, despite the eccentricity of how he never removed his armor (when asked, Genji bluffs and says that he is too scarred from an accident that nearly took his life, long ago. That he does not desire to mar the pleasant atmosphere and memories they make with the horror of his guise, as a courtesy to those he spent time with.

It is not truly a lie.)

(These little graces, he learns, too.)


	2. Chapter 2

They pass through a small town by the sea, perched atop cliffs by the waves. Zenyatta strikes up a conversation with the innkeeper over his meal, rice and pickled radish topped with sea urchin roe. Genji keeps him company, swords laid by his side, and does not think of very much at all until Zenyatta asks, tentatively, “Ah – about that empty plot outside town…”

The innkeeper, an old woman that had barely come up to Genji’s breastbone, laughs. “Ah!” she cackles. “You must truly be an excellent monk, then, to sense that.” She shakes her head. “Tales go that there used to be a man who lived there with his wife. After she was killed, he climbed up the mountain alone, at night. The mountain god found him, and, seeing his true, humble nature, spared him the sentence of death. 

“That lot has been empty for generations – the family had no children or kin who wanted the house or land, so the house fell apart, long ago. Even my grandmother couldn’t remember a time in which there was a building there – but the foundations remain, so it must be true.”

When the innkeeper leaves, Genji leans in, head tilted questioningly. Zenyatta smiles at him small and answers, “There once was a grudge housed on that land. Though it is long gone, the impressions it left have yet to fade. That was all I felt, I believe.”

Genji counts out coin to pay for their meal. When they leave, Genji notes the paper lanterns that hang from poles driven into the ground at the crossroads outside town. 

“The man was said to have walked the mountain in the dark,” Zenyatta remarks when he sees what has caught Genji’s eye. “Perhaps this is the way they honor the legend.”

“Perhaps,” Genji returns.

* * *

It is dusk when they reach the shrine at the summit of the path, and Genji says, firmly, “We will rest here tonight.” Zenyatta, at his side, does not complain, merely nods, silent, and fishes in his pack for incense to light in respect. Genji watches the other, the way his lips move in prayer and the way closing his eyes has darkened the smudges of exhaustion beneath them, before moving to step off of the road, circling the body of the roadside shrine.

In the small clearing behind he finds enough flat, clear ground for a fire; there is dead wood stacked against the shrine’s back wall; and Genji barely pauses when he realizes there are lanterns here, too, paper lanterns painted with delicate birds in flight or flowers or vistas of the sea.

“Oh – what lovely offerings,” Zenyatta remarks as he rounds the shrine himself. “Do you need any more of me, Genji?”

“Have you water?” Genji asks. When Zenyatta lifts the canteen at his side, Genji grunts in acknowledgment. “Then no. Wait, I do – come over here and sit down. _ Rest_.”

Zenyatta laughs, but he obeys. By the time Genji has the fire going, he is nearly asleep, head propped up in one hand. When Genji eases him into a prone position, draping a blanket upon him after, he does not wake, merely murmurs something indistinct before settling once more.

Genji watches him, and the emotion that roils in his chest is something that he is familiar with, something that he knows, ingrained deep in his being like Iris gold.

When night falls, the lanterns alight.

They tread in another’s domain now. The signs of it are, too, something he had learned at Zenyatta’s side.

Genji does not flinch – he can feel the way life thrums upon this mountain – merely stares at them unblinking for a long moment, senses alert. When there is the rustle of cloth, his eyes dart to it to find a man settling sieza in the clearing across from him, the fire between, the bulk of him obscuring the light of a few of the lanterns.

“Hail and well met,” the man murmurs, and his voice barely carries over the crackling of the wood in the blaze, rings deep despite it. “It has been a while since we have last had guests.” He is broad-shouldered and dressed in blue, cloth edged with an immaculate white that matches both his hair and the myriad of scars that litter his hands and face and neck. He smiles, and it is warm. “Welcome. You have my promise of safe shelter.”

Genji merely inclines his head. The man’s eyes soften.

“It’s alright,” he says. “Your companion needs the rest, I know. He will not wake until dawn at the earliest. I can grant him that, at least.” His eyes drop down to where Zenyatta lies, curled almost against Genji’s hip. “I remember what it was like to feel so tired. Bone-weary, as if I could sleep for a decade and more.”

“You are the lord of this mountain, then?” Genji asks. The other looks surprised, lips parted, before he leans in.

“Oh – oh, no, no, I am not – I’m as mortal as he is. As you were.” The man smiles in the face of Genji’s incredulous stare. “This is merely where I’ve chosen to make my home, with the blessings of the little god that resides here.”

“I told you to not expect much of the newly-divine, Tatsu,” another voice rumbles. Genji sits up straight as _ something _ passes through the gloom at his back, circling the clearing to slide into sight between Genji and the shrine – a wolf the height of a man at the shoulder flops down to the dirt at Tatsu’s side, yellow gaze fixed upon Genji.

“Be kind, Jiro,” the man in blue scolds gently. The wolf yawns widely in reply, showing off ivory teeth, before sneezing once.

“It is the truth,” the wolf returns and then he stretches out enough to thump his head down in the lap of the man in blue.

“Forgive him – he has little patience nor practice with guests,” Tatsu says. He pets one of the wolf’s ears between forefinger and thumb, idly, absentmindedly. “It’s something of a surprise to see you here – most are leery of traveling these ways at night.”

“Why would they be?” Genji asks. He cannot help but keep his voice low, even if he knows that Zenyatta will not wake. “When they know your legend? Enough so to leave you lanterns?”

Tatsu smiles, but it is a smaller thing this time. “Once, before a poor carpenter ascended the mountain to offer himself to the little god that resided here, the mountain was haunted by a beast that struck mercilessly if one hesitated, fell, or looked back upon the path at night. The ways were only walkable by day – I suppose that caution yet remains.”

“Yet we were safe in ascending?”

Tatsu rubs Jiro’s head, and the great wolf rumbles. “The yama-inu who once ran these paths became something more when he ventured down from the mountain in pursuit of a poor carpenter he knew,” Jiro answers. “Such is the nature of spirits and the divine. I no longer acted as a yama-inu did, and so I was no longer a yama-inu. Such is the power of men, to evoke change in those long unchanging.”

The wolf opens one eye. “This is something you are no doubt familiar with, are you not? Former grudge?”

Genji falls silent, contemplative. Then he says, “You called me newly-divine. This is true. I am newly come to the life of something like a little god. There are things I know, and then there are things that I Know – and then there are a great many things I do not know at all.” Genji finds his gaze drifting to where Zenyatta lies. “But it falls in the end that I _ am _ new to my divinity. Please, forgive my ignorance. What should I know about what I am now?” 

Tatsu looks down at the wolf that lies in his lap. Cards a hand through the fur of his ruff as the little god exhales, almost like a sigh.

“Your hunger will always haunt you. It is a part of you now, was a part of you as both a man and a mononoke. It has not left you in your divinity.” Jiro stretches and then heaves himself upright. “You have power, power that will not ebb and will only grow. But some of your power belongs to that of the spirit world and some gives to the world of men, due to your nature: what you were and how you came to be. You are the storm that people seek shelter from, instead of the silent wave that passes most by. This is both a strength and weakness. Perhaps, in the distant future, this will change. 

“But for now, you are what you are, and what human things and values you still hold dear tether you to the world of men and their perception. When this is no longer true, perhaps then you will become solely a being of spirit.” Jiro tilts his head. “Or perhaps not. I do not know your heart – only what I can perceive of your nature, as one little god to another.”

Genji does not look down at Zenyatta. Instead, he asks, “And you? Are there human things, mortal things, you hold close to your heart?”

At this, Jiro throws back his great head and laughs, teeth bared and glinting in the firelight. He answers, scathing, “Once, mortal men tamed the wolves of this land and made them companions to run and hunt at their sides as pack. I still have those echoes in my blood, in my being, though I harbor no love lost for humanity and their carelessness.” He settles once more. “Human things I hold dear… once, long ago, the yama-inu I was left the mountain of his home and birth to walk the world of men in pursuit of a poor carpenter that had fallen upon the path, a man that the yama-inu had stayed its fangs for. 

“That yama-inu is no more, changed by the human things he held dear, and in denying his nature as yama-inu, he discarded his identity, everything that he had known as a being, in exchange for something strange and exhilarating.” Jiro shifts his weight and where there was once a wolf now sits a man, dressed in a russet-orange kimono and weathered hakama, blades slung at his back and hip. His close-cropped hair shines red from the firelight, and when he grins he shows pointed teeth set in gums black like a dog’s. His eyes – still yellow, still the gaze of a beast – turn towards Tatsu at his side. He extends a hand, and the other places his in it.

Jiro brings it to his lips, touches them to Tatsu’s fingers briefly, and then rises. “There are others on the mountain tonight. I shall keep an eye on them. Don’t stay up.” When he slinks into the underbrush, he does so without a sound, disappears like a wraith or a memory. Both Tatsu and Genji watch him go.

“Were you ever afraid of him?” Genji asks. Tatsu smiles, still staring out into the woods.

“Never of what he was. Cautious of what he could do, yes, but never afraid of what he was or what he became.” He shifts to fasten his gaze upon Genji once more. “I never truly regretted climbing this mountain the final time. Even if, in doing so, I became something a little more divine than I had been.” He laughs, lightly. “But then again, the Tatsu of old would never have ascended – would never have given himself over. I changed as well.”

“They leave the lanterns out as offerings.”

“When I was merely a man – only a poor carpenter, nothing more – I made lanterns for the village. Over the years, I suppose, the legend of the man who climbed the mountain at night to be spared by a little god became synonymous with that which I had once made. So they bring us lanterns, and I give them to those who stumble, unwary, upon us in the dark to light their way. Such is the nature of time and man, to change.”

Genji considers the other, hesitates. Yet if there is anything he has learned, both before his death and after, it is that naught will be gained for his embarrassment over his cowardice. He forges ahead. 

“_You _ changed as well. You were a man and then – ? You are not like me, did not die to be reborn. And you are not like my companion, who has devoted himself to divinity, body and soul. So how – ?”

Tatsu watches him back. Then he says, “When I was a poor carpenter, nothing more, I traveled between this town and the next by crossing this mountain. I did it enough that the yama-inu that roamed its paths took notice, for how few others were willing to travel by night. I left him food as offering. Eventually, he would walk along the road at my side. We would talk, sometimes. Sometimes he just kept me company. It went like that for years – years, until I finally fell in my exhaustion and haste to be back home.

“He knew why I hurried.” Unconsciously, Tatsu turns over his hands, rubs at the scars that web both them and his forearms as though counting rosary beads. His gaze drops. “And he knew of my wife’s temperament. And, most importantly, he knew _ me_. That part of the legend is true. For all those long nights spent as traveling companions, stories and food and laughter shared, he knew _ me_, and so he did not – could not – kill me as his nature demanded.”

“He fell in love,” Genji says, and Tatsu opens his eyes and smiles brightly, wide.

“Such is the nature of man, to be able to affect such change,” Tatsu answers. “And so shaped by his heart and the memories that we had made, he stayed his culling jaw, and I lived to descend the mountain once more. The yama-inu of the lonely paths had fallen in love and could not kill the object of it as his nature demanded. And so he changed – because he could not remain a yama-inu if it meant my death.”

“And you? Did you love him then?” Genji asks.

“He was so kind,” Tatsu answers, voice nearly a whisper. “So kind to that former me.”

A branch snaps in the fire. Tatsu does not quite startle, but he straightens. “Ah, my apologies,” he says. “I did not mean to be so long-winded.” Collects himself. 

“When Jiro descended the mountain, free to do so because of what he was now not, he found me. In time, he helped lay to rest the mononoke that my wife had become. And, when I was ready, I climbed the mountain and left my old life behind to offer myself as bride to the little god he became for his love. And, in our union, because of it, I became something different from what I had been as well.”

Genji swallows, nervousness fluttering in his belly; he resolutely does not look down to where Zenyatta lies, but he cannot help his voice from lowering. “Your longevity – does that stem from your change as well?”

Tatsu tips his head to one side, and his gaze falls to where Zenyatta sleeps soundly, undisturbed. “Ah,” he says softly, then begins, “No; that is likely – ” before biting his words in half as he blushes bright red, flusters. “O-Oh, um – I – I couldn’t say if it is entirely due to what I am or if – if it is the result of, of energy shared, partnered with a desire that we both hold: to make up for the years spent apart. But the time that I have been given…” 

Tatsu considers Zenyatta. Then he looks back up at Genji. “You wish to extend his life. Is that it?”

“He has given up so much of himself in aid of others,” Genji replies. His voice thins, strained by the emotion he bites back. “And the Iris is kind, but it is merciless. It is not meant to touch what is merely mortal. I – ” Genji presses a hand to his sternum, where he thinks he can feel, some days, the way Zenyatta’s pulse thrums golden for the power he had channeled and lent in love of what Genji could and had been, to grant him his chance at absolution. Changing him, too. 

“Surely I must be able to do _ more_.”

Tatsu is silent. Then he says, “Jiro called you a being that straddled both the world of men and spirit. You bear blades like him, like they grew as a part of you, wear armor like skin.” 

“It was his,” Genji says. “Because how else could he house a soul, a spirit, in a way that the world of man could see? In a form they could recognize and still know?”

“Would you take off your helm?”

Genji raises his hands. He shakes out his hair when it is freed, cut short now, unlike how he had grown it long for his life as a lordson. One more change. He meets Tatsu’s eyes squarely, chin raised, and the other seems to consider him for a long moment before he smiles.

“And your name, little god?” he asks.

To which the other replies, “Genji. Just Genji, now,” and the name rings on his tongue as truth.

Tatsu nods. “Blood will suffice. For an atoner, for one who refused to be laid to rest in exchange for the good he could yet do – blood, as a little sacrifice that can be made to a little god. 

“You already know the strength in blood. If it is freely given, it will empower you and spare him the body of the strain of calling upon a power not meant for the mutable.” His gaze falls to Zenyatta again. “He is a virtuous man. An honorable one. And there is merit in the tales of how devouring the flesh of virtuous men grants demons longevity – perhaps even immortality. It would be amplified for a willing sacrifice made – sacrifice and the exchange of power through vital humors.”

Genji considers this. Then, he asks, “In those tales, marriage could also suffice. Is that something like the sacrifice you made of yourself?”

“You have already seen the strength of change that love can affect. Combine that with the sacrifice of an old life of solitude and the offering made of a being, body and soul – yes. Marriage and the accord of paired hearts and the, ah, the exchange of intimacies, after – ” Tatsu answers, ducking his head. “Yes. Something like what I did, all those years ago, when I ascended the mountain that final time. We are mortals of the world of men, and so we must give and take energy and intent in the form of physical things of ourselves – flesh and blood and bone, sweat and tears, seed and slick – sometimes spirits ask for hair, too, or heirlooms, other possessions held dear. And marriage – in my marriage to Jiro, I gave him all of myself, and so I was reborn in the spirit of the accord we held as something different and new.”

“I see.” Genji falls silent, mind turning over what he has learned. “Thank you,” he adds belatedly, suddenly, as he remembers. Tatsu laughs.

“Your care for him is evident. And you are newly divine, born again for a noble purpose – it is no hardship to aid one such as you.” Tatsu rises, brushes off his clothes. “I will leave you to your thoughts and your rest. You have our promise of safe passage – take a lantern, when you go.”

Genji rises and bows. “Thank you, again. What you have given me…”

“Advice and knowledge,” the other demurs. “It is your own actions that will determine their worth.” He smiles. “Fare well, Genji. And good hunting.”

When Genji rises from his bow, the other is gone.


	3. Chapter 3

Genji means to ask kindly. He means to give Zenyatta the choice and the time to consider the potential ramifications of giving him blood as a little sacrifice to a little god. He does not want to take from the other more than what he has already received.

Yet life conspires otherwise, as it always has, as it always will, as Genji has learned and knows.

“Stay with me,” Genji demands of Zenyatta, and he does not bother keeping the urgency bordering anger out of his voice. “Zenyatta. Stay with me.”

Zenyatta’s head lolls. His eyes blink, flutter, unfocused. Genji presses the both of them further into the closet of this mansion, this deathtrap, this place that houses mononoke like he had been, lost in his nightly dream of how Shimada Genji had been slain; he puts himself between the sliding cupboard door and where Zenyatta lies in an untidy sprawl half-propped up against the back wall, his robes torn and their saffron coloring black with red.

They had only been expecting one mononoke. One tale of an unhappy bride, promised too young, given over too early, and slain from jealousy, petty cruelty soon after her marriage to the young lord. One curse grounded in pain, denial, anger, fear – one curse that haunted the streets of this town, that lured children away from their mothers, that drove men to madness with the nightly scrape of claws against windowsills. 

Zenyatta had run his long-fingered hands over the gouges in the wood and murmured, “Bakeneko.” When he had looked to Genji, after, the gold of power used had been fading from the depths of his eyes. Genji had nodded in reply to Zenyatta’s unspoken question: could he fight? Had he the strength?

One curse. One grudge. One soul locked in a memory of pain, transformed into something lethal and gruesome. Genji had nodded. He would lend his strength.

It is not one curse. Not one spirit. It is, instead, a bloodsoaked loathing that dyes the very foundations of the mansion red: the small bride that had died too young had only been the last. She had befriended one of the remaining cats left in the household, had earned its love, and Genji’s footfalls had crunched across the mortal remains of all the little things the young lord had killed for the pleasure and power of it as they had run across the courtyard.

It is not one curse. It is not one spirit. After the death of the little bride too young at the hands of her husband, there had been no cats left in the house – no cats that remained. Only carcasses and the bakeneko made from her and those that had gone before.

“Run,” Zenyatta slurs, and his grip on Genji’s arm is yet strong despite the way he is barely clinging to consciousness. Genji bares his teeth under his helm. “You cannot – ”

“I will not leave you here!” Genji snaps in response. He does not care that they are overmatched – he will not abandon Zenyatta to his fate. He _ cannot_. He refuses.

“_Genji_,” Zenyatta rasps, and then makes a startled sound as the other turns on him, shaking off his hand. Genji tries to ignore the wet print it leaves behind on his armor.

“Do you trust me?” Genji asks instead. Somehow, the desperation he feels has cleared from his voice. Has left it ringing, instead, with only the determination he feels, hardening it with the resolution to get them _ both _ out, to ensure they _ both _ survive this fight.

Zenyatta looks up at him with gold guttering in the depths of his dark eyes. He does not hesitate when he breathes: “_Yes_.

“Yes. Body and soul.”

His naked honesty is too much – is too much an honor for one lonely spirit, one little god. Genji closes his eyes for a moment, overwhelmed, but his voice is steady as he says, “Then I would take of you.”

“I am freely given.” A faint smile touches the corners of Zenyatta’s eyes around the pain. “As was implied.” Then he makes a little breathy gasp as Genji crowds against him in the dark of the closet, in the fragile safety of this shelter.

Genji discards his gauntlets with two sharp motions, then his helm, and he sets his forming claws to the rents in Zenyatta’s robes, cuts through sodden cloth around where the other is clutching to stem the flow, revealing the glancing damage the other had taken from a mononoke that had flanked him and shattered his shields, parallel lines that had scored through the barriers like a blade.

Genji does not hesitate at the sight of Zenyatta’s flesh so profaned. He has his resolve, and he has the anger it stokes in him instead. Genji bends and seals his lips to ruined flesh. The blood of this virtuous man flows across his forked tongue, and Genji _ eats_.

(It tastes like blood. Only like blood. As it should, for this powerful, beloved, merely mortal man.)

The power that swells in him with every swallow is not the gold of the Iris, nor the electric tension of the northern storm. It is a red, fluttering thing that thrums against the memory of Genji’s mortal ribs, that settles behind his former bones and makes itself at home: scarlet, delicate like the edge of a sparrow’s feather, like a sakura petal fallen from a bloom, like the flicker of a morpho’s wing; and Genji snarls and tears his mouth away before his fangs pierce Zenyatta as well, the taste of iron all in his throat and all down his chin. 

Zenyatta’s head tips back, tracking Genji’s movements, and the other’s eyes are round with surprise. Belatedly, Genji realizes the pressure against his head is the weight of the other’s hand, fingers tangled in the short locks of his hair.

Zenyatta tugs. Tips his face up towards Genji, parts his lips. His eyes half-lid.

“You mean to eat me?” Zenyatta breathes, and his voice, however faint, is colored with humor. “That was a poor attempt. 

“Try _ harder_.”

Genji’s heart flips. “And they called _ me _ a demon,” Genji returns, but he bends willingly enough, eagerly enough, when Zenyatta pulls at his hair once more. He feeds red power back into their kiss alongside the taste of blood, and Zenyatta groans with the sting of Genji’s fangs against his lips.

“Hide. Heal. I expect you to be alive when I return,” Genji tells him when they part, and Zenyatta stares up at him with eyes blown black from more than just the gloom – before clicking his tongue and returning, falsely-aggrieved, “Very well. If you insist.”

Genji leaves his blades. Genji leaves his armor. Genji pulls Zenyatta’s ruined robes tighter about the other and presses one more kiss to his clammy skin. The rekindling glow of harmonious gold is enough to reassure him.

Genji crosses the courtyard and scales overtake his form with every step. The bones of feline and man weather away to dust around him, ground down by water and wind. The doors to the main hall slam open before him, and the sea of red, sleek, furred bodies inside overspills, comes rushing down the walkway and out into the yard. The white figure of the little bride rises from their seething mass like an island standing against waves; the black figures of her handmaidens flank her, surround her like the bars of a cage. She pulls the last of Genji’s shuriken from them, the blessed metal dropping into the silent, shifting hoard that surrounds her.

Her attendants look at Genji in unison. Their eyes are yellow, thin-slitted vertical.

The tension breaks. They lunge for him, stretching inhumanly long beyond their normal bounds, fingers lengthening into claws, and their screams are those of the cats that surge alongside them, a hundred desperate animal yowls twined around the core of a woman’s desperate shriek.

Genji looks up at the gathering clouds. He surrenders the memory of his mortal form. “Forgive me,” he says.

The strength of the northern storm bolstered scours the red foundations clean.

* * *

“The townspeople are talking of the best way to raise a shrine to you.”

Genji shifts his weight in a rasp of scales against cloth. “Oh?” he replies.

“Alongside a monument to the mononoke you slew, to appease their memory,” Zenyatta elaborates. “They asked me to bless the site. They don’t intend to build there again, after everything that your winds exposed under the structures.” His voice is amused. “So they will make, instead, a shrine of remembrance to those lives lost too early, and a shrine of worship to the dragon of the storm that struck so precisely, tearing down just enough to reveal the truth.”

“… I will have… homage paid to me.” Genji tries the concept out on his tongue and then grimaces, his lips curling and snout furrowing. “I am not certain I enjoy the taste of that.”

Zenyatta laughs at him. Gently scrapes his fingernails down the wrinkle Genji’s moue of distaste makes on the other’s face. “Take it as a blessing,” he advises, mirth in his tone. “You will grow stronger for it, a little god bolstered by worship.”

“Did you not say yourself that the Iris provides?” Genji leans into the other’s touch.

“Sometimes it provides in ways unexpected to even me,” Zenyatta replies primly.

Genji snorts gustily at that, reclaims the memory of Shimada Genji after, and sinks as he shifts, settles with Zenyatta back atop the futon carefully for the man’s healing injuries. The Iris had mended the worst of the damage, but there is still enough left to scar, one set more to add to the collection scattered like stars across Zenyatta’s skin. Genji pulls the blankets about them both. “Do we leave at dawn?”

“Mid-morning, perhaps,” Zenyatta replies. “I will bless the site at dawn for their sake; there’s nothing left there due to how… thorough you were, but it will reassure them if I go through the motions.”

Genji thinks about how he had surged, a thunderhead stacked high, seeded about a throbbing core of gifted, vital, mortal strength. He remembers how the claws of the mononoke had passed through his vapor without doing harm. How they had yowled in thwarted defiance and how his rain had drenched them flat, stinging, blinding their senses. The wind and lightning of his fangs had torn her attendants apart, and the little bride had lowered her hands from her face and looked up into Genji’s maw, after, unafraid despite how power had swelled his might to dwarf her.

“Bakeneko,” Genji had murmured with the voice of the storm, and the little bride had inclined her head in a nod. “You remember.”

Her voice is clear. Steady. “He was going to kill her. She had done nothing wrong! And I… I scored his skin with my nails trying to save her. He struck me down for the hurt.” Her voice strengthens. “He stood over me as I bled, and he laughed and laughed, and all the staff _ watched_, silent, and I knew, I _ knew_, I knew I would be buried in that charnel pit in the yard as just one more body, one more task – 

“And I _ hated _ him and that home with all my being in that moment. As the life left me. As I died.” 

Her mouth spasms. Her dark eyes flash animal-reflective, yellow and haunted. “And all the little, uneasy grudges felt it. _ Knew _ it. I was enough. My weight tore open the paper of the flimsy screen that kept them from the walking, waking world. And we fell upon them in retaliation.

“But the blood that served the house yet lives! Their children _ live _ and breathe and spend one day after another blissfully _ free _ – ” Her hands twitch against her wedding robes. Her nails, too long, rake at the fabric. Genji gazes down at this human fury married to primal force and feels a kinship for what he had been.

“Your regret,” he intones, and his voice is not compulsion like the temple bells of the Iris that would swell Zenyatta’s voice beyond its bounds – but it does not have to be. The mononoke recognize power, no matter the source, and the northern storm that Genji has become, bolstered in strength by the raw, living thing he had taken as offered from a virtuous man: that is enough.

“I wanted to be _ happy_,” the little bride says, and her voice is stripped now of the underlying howl of the animals killed for the lord’s pleasure, is unwound from the cries of the servants who had been, too. It is a solo lament – hers and only hers. “I wanted a family. A husband to cherish and children to be proud of…” Her voice breaks. “Why me? Why _ me_? Why did it have to be me? That even my simple dream would be impossible – ”

Genji leans in as she reaches out. Lets her tangle her blunt, human fingers in his mane, lets her hide her tear-stained face against his scales. This human grief he remembers, too. This human grief he yet knows.

“Then be freed,” he breathes, and the gale about them surges. “Be freed of what you became. And may your next life be kinder to the you that you become.”

Genji rattles the heavens. Genji sunders the earth. Genji tears down the mansion, tile by tile, beam by beam, until only a few walls remain, until the rest is merely debris piled about the foundations split open by lightning to reveal the bones buried beneath. 

When the little bride lets go, she dissolves as gold-edged smoke onto the wind.

The breadth of Zenyatta’s back rises and falls rhythmically underneath Genji’s hands. When he shifts, Genji feels the flick of his long lashes against his skin. “What is on your mind?” he asks, and Genji stares at the ceiling of this loaned room.

“I have become a little god,” Genji says, eventually, and then stops. Zenyatta waits, as patient as time itself.

“I have become a little god,” Genji says, “but I did not ask for worship. I do not desire adulation – had only wanted a chance to atone. But…” and Zenyatta’s weight is a solid thing against him, reassuring in his arms. “I will not deny this power. My desire to atone was born out of selfishness, and there are yet human things I hold on to. Hold dear. When the last of these fades from this mortal world, perhaps that will change. Perhaps I will be Genji no longer. Perhaps, when the last of this loaned grace runs dry, I will go with it, too. Who can say.

“Until then, I will fight. And, for that, such power is not unwelcome.”

Zenyatta shifts to meet Genji’s eyes. Lifts one hand, slowly, watching all the while, to lay it against Genji’s temple. Traces down his cheek, his jaw, the line of his neck, until it lies flat against where the memory of a human heart beats. 

“Then I will pray that the Iris keeps you by my side,” Zenyatta breathes. “For my selfishness, too, I hope that we may share the same battlefields for years yet to come. That we may walk the same curving path together, side by side.”

Genji stares at the figure of the other, arrested by the feeling in his chest. Outside, there is the distant roll of thunder.

Genji fits his hand over Zenyatta’s where it rests on his chest. They hold so for the length of a handful of heartbeats, felt underneath their fingertips in an echo of the Iris, following in the wake of the mortal flesh of the man that had channeled its power to fulfill the dying wish of a lonely grudge that became a little god.

“We should rest,” Genji says. “We leave mid-morning.”

Zenyatta smiles. Turns his hand underneath Genji’s to fold their fingers together. Easing into slumber, he closes his eyes.

Genji does not. He tethers his spirit instead to the shape of this mortal form. Dwells there, content to commit the living weight against him to beloved memory.

That night, there is no rain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _**Mono no aware**_ (物の哀れ), literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence (無常 mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life. "Mono-no aware: the ephemeral nature of beauty – the quietly elated, bittersweet feeling of having been witness to the dazzling circus of life – knowing that none of it can last. It’s basically about being both saddened and appreciative of transience – and also about the relationship between life and death. In Japan, there are four very distinct seasons, and you really become aware of life and mortality and transience. You become aware of how significant those moments are.”[1] (Wikipedia, 08SEPT2019)
> 
> thanks for reading!


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